Last night we read of the arrest of 11 people (including
5 members of the R.S.D.L. Duma
group[2]) near Petrograd,
and we sent a telegram to Branting today to help you
ascertain (through the Finns le cas
échéant[1]
whether the
5 members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group have been arrested.

But all the more impermissible in that case will be your
departure for Denmark. In any case, I protest energetically
against such a departure. This is the time for you to be in
Stockholm personally, in order to establish better, more
frequent and more extensive contacts. This is a difficult
job, it requires an experienced person, with a knowledge
of at least one foreign language. It cannot be left just
to “anyone” to look after.

If you are pressed (by the police) in Stockholm, you
should hide in some village near Stockholm (this is easily
done, they have telephones everywhere). I think Kollontai,
too, could soon easily come to Stockholm or to some
suburban place, incognito.

Notes

[2]The arrest of Bolsheviks attending a conference at Ozerki, near
Petrograd, among them members of the R.S.D.L. group in the
Fourth Duma.

The conference was held from November 2 to 4 (15 to 17), 1914,
and was attended by Bolsheviks from Petrograd,
Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov and Riga.

On November 4 (17), when the conference had just ended, the
police, on information of a provocateur, raided the premises.
During the search, copies of Lenin’s theses on the war and
Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33, which carried the C.C., R.S.D.L.P. manifesto,
The War and Russian Social-Democracy, were confiscated from
Duma Bolshevik deputies Petrovsky, Badayev and others. All
the participants in the conference were arrested, except for the
deputies, because of their parliamentary immunity. But they
too were arrested two days later, put on trial and exiled for life
to Eastern Siberia. Lenin analysed the results of the trial in his
article “What Has Been Revealed by the Trial of the Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group”, which was published
in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40 on March 29, 1915 (see present
edition, Vol. 21, pp. 171–77).

[3]The reply of the Petrograd liquidators (P. P. Maslov, A. N.
Potresov, N. Cherevanin [F. A. Lipkin] and others) to E.
Vandervelde’s telegram urging the Russian Social-Democrats not to
campaign against the war. The liquidators justified the Belgian,
French and British socialists who had entered their bourgeois
governments, and supported the social-chauvinists, and declared
that they, for their part, did not oppose the war. Their reply was
published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 34, with a note from the
Editorial Board.